Outside Innovation

Opportunities to Improve Customer Experience While Cutting Costs

We are all watching the downward spiral of the global economy with trepidation and making contingency plans. Our budgeted projects may be slashed. Our headcount may be downsized. Our travel will be severely curtailed. Our customers’ spending on our products and services will no doubt decrease. But what’s the silver lining in a severe downturn? We have to get innovative and resourceful. Here are some tips to consider:

Shift Policies to Trust Your Customers and Partners and Eliminate 30% of Business Friction

As we work with organizations and their customers to streamline customers' scenarios and to improve the customer experience, we find that some of the most customer-unfriendly practices are the result of deep-seated customer distrust on the part of the organization. Well-meaning corporate stewards have put policies and processes in place to prevent fraudulent behaviors in response to the actions of a minority of bad acting customers. Instead of using intelligent technology to identify the few real offenders, companies put elaborate blanket safeguards in place. These safeguards create friction and a lot of unnecessary work for your employees, your partners, and your customers. Our recent Customer Scenarios in a wide-variety of industries show dramatic opportunities to save money and increase revenues by shifting to a customer-trust model.

Create Trust-Based Policies; Isolate Offenders. Why not operate on the assumption that your customers and business partners are honest and will not knowingly steal from you or defraud you? Remove the costly and onerous hoops you currently make everyone jump through in order to use, share, restore, and enjoy the products and services you provide. Here are just a few examples of customer-unfriendly policies that annoy customers while increasing operational costs:

• Placing a multi-day hold on funds deposited at an ATM machine, forcing customers to come into the branches to make deposits so they can access their money (a common banking practice in several countries).

• Requiring that a serial number match a service contract number before you'll provide technical support or renew a support contract.

Revisiting CRM: What is it really?

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a topic that our clients continue to raise. Everyone continues to complain about having imperfect information about their customers, silo’d customer experiences, and a lack of ability to make relevant offers to the right people at the right time. CRM continues to be a holy grail. Most organizations mount a new campaign to attain the holy grail of achieving a perfect “360-degree view of our customers” about once every five or six years.

Recently, one of our clients—who has done a great job in improving customer experience for customer-critical processes—was “rewarded” for his accomplishments by being handed a new challenge this Fall. He has been asked to head up his firm’s CRM strategy initiative.

My reaction was, “Oh no! Do you really want to do that? That’s a thankless task. It’s highly political. It’s fraught with technology and organizational challenges. Most companies go about it in the wrong way and waste millions of dollars and lots of effort.” He replied, “I know. We’ve already tried this four times in the 20 years that I’ve been with this company. But I’m probably the only person who could pull it off. I’m coming at it from the customers’ point of view.” That attitude encouraged me and I promised to help him on his quest.

So I looked through the papers that we had written about CRM in the past, and decided that it was time to refresh one of my earlier reports on this topic. Much of my thinking remains the same: the best way to approach the challenge of CRM is to think about it as a strategy that will enable your customers to manage their relationships with you, and as a supporting infrastructure that lets you manage and continuously improve the experiences that customers have with your brand.

Rethinking CRM: Provide Customers the Information They Care about in a Seamless Fashion
Customers Don’t Want to Be Managed; They Do Want Good Experiences and Outcomes

Why CRM Doesn't Work

I had dinner last month with a long-time client—someone whose customer-centric work I have followed and respected for many years. She's moving on to a new career and it was great to have an opportunity to get a synopsis of some of her lessons learned over the 10 years that I've been following her work. I was taken aback when she, a long-time reader of our weekly advisory service, said: "You never told us that CRM wouldn't work!"